Regardless of their size, organizations today must keep up with the speed of business to remain competitive and profitable. Yet, it has become increasingly difficult to focus on the strategic aspects of business when the company is bogged down by routine tasks. Nowhere is this more of an issue than in IT, where daily operational tasks consume the bulk of critical resources, leaving little time to focus on reducing risk and streamlining processes to minimize costs, maximize customer satisfaction and increase shareholder value.
Most organizations don’t have the budget or the staff to cover day-to-day operations and also provide rapid response to business changes and requests. As a result, users grow frustrated waiting for new reports or system process changes, and organizations may fall behind in managing costs or responding to customer requirements. Mergers and acquisitions only exacerbate the problem when integrating disparate business systems and rationalizing processes and procedures. The solution is to deploy efficient business applications, including Microsoft Dynamics AX, in a private cloud.
Benefits of a Private Cloud
Private clouds, whether hosted or on premise, reside behind the company’s firewall for added security. This allows the company to restrict access to its servers to employees and designated partners, helping to minimize the risk of a data breach. A private cloud may offer IaaS (infrastructure as a service), SaaS (software as a service) or both. A private cloud may be provisioned internally or by the hosting company.
A private cloud offers the efficiency, accessibility, power and other desirable features of a public cloud, combined with the security, control and performance of an on-premise or dedicated environment. With a private cloud, organizations may choose to build the infrastructure themselves using their own servers, or they can bring in a third party to build and deliver the dedicated resources they need.
Why Choose a Private with Microsoft Dynamics AX
Because of their single tenant infrastructure, private clouds offer ease of integration to third-party applications and the ability to customize applications as necessary. This is especially important to companies running Microsoft Dynamics AX because of its unique architecture. Microsoft Dynamics AX is designed to easily support custom code and add-on products so that every company can perfectly tailor the application to match its unique requirements.
Private clouds are flexible, allowing better resource management from a single location and enabling IT to easily move workloads to servers to balance demand and capacity. This flexibility provides optimum performance for every workload, and improves infrastructure utilization. In addition, private clouds are easily scalable, allowing customers to add new applications, new users—even whole new companies or divisions—with little or no notice and with no adverse impact on performance.
Cost savings in a private cloud are driven by standardization or automation of services or IT computer resources. Standardization and automation reduce operational costs and free IT personnel to focus on servicing customers rather than on activities with little or no added value, such as allocating disk space, adding new users or configuring software. The biggest benefit to a private cloud deployment is off-loading mundane ongoing maintenance tasks so that the IT team can turn its attention to business improvements using the advanced business capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX. Sophisticated CIOs recognize the combination of cloud deployment and Microsoft Dynamics AX as a strategy that supports growth and competitiveness.
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